Uncommon Pleasure (20 page)

“Whatever.”

Based on Ty’s expression he didn’t mind if Sean drove the car off the Pleasure Pier into the Gulf, so he pulled into the late-night drive-through at Wendy’s and stared at the brightly illuminated menu board. “That was different,” he said absently.

“Yeah,” Ty said, his voice thick.

A girl’s sleepy voice buzzed from the speaker, asking for their order. “A triple stack combo with bacon, extra large, and a Coke,” Sean said. Maybe food would settle his stomach, roiling with a knowledge he’d rather bury under two pounds of grease than acknowledge. “You want anything?”

“I’m not hungry,” Ty said.

Sean looked at him. Ty refused to meet his gaze. Frustrated, he asked, “Why’d we do that? Why did you let me fuck a woman you care about?”

“I don’t care about her.”

Thick-headed bastard. “Great. If you don’t care we can compare notes. I’ll start, because goddamn, that was the best blow job I’ve ever had. Of course, it’s been over a year, but objectively speaking, Lauren was incredible. That thing you were talking about…the back of her throat thing…” Sean shook his head. “Nice soundtrack.”

Some guys could do this, talk about women and sex like it was a replay of a Ping-Pong game. He wasn’t one of those guys. Heat stained his cheekbones, but Ty still wouldn’t look at him, so he kept going. Maybe discussing every little detail would make it real, push
Abby to the side so he could move on, and push Lauren to the front of Ty’s mind.

“It was probably for the best that Lauren was on top, because even after the blow job my control wasn’t all that great. The whole thing was so fucking hot. Every time you got a little deeper in her ass she’d tighten around me, and when Lauren came—”

A muscle jumped in Ty’s jaw each time he said
Lauren
. “Give it a rest, Winthrop.”

Sean just looked at him. “Make up your mind, Hendricks. You either don’t care, or you do. Marines fight in pairs, and they fuck in pairs. Girlfriends are off-limits, but you said she’s not your girlfriend, so she’s just a piece of ass, right? An exceptionally talented piece of ass,” he said meditatively. “So go on, tell me what you thought.”

“I think you’re in danger of losing your teeth to my fist.”

A fistfight in the Wendy’s drive-through lane sounded pretty good, given that Ty was in the process of throwing away what Sean now knew he wanted, so he launched another salvo. “How was her ass? Come to think of it, how do you talk a girl into that? You think Lauren would be up for another round, let me get some practice in?”

Would Abby go for that?
Maybe she already had, with Ben the Galveston Cop who looked like he’d be up for anything.

His stomach dropped another six inches.

Fist balled at the end of his cocked arm, Ty swung around in the passenger seat. Sean held his gaze for a long moment. “Don’t care, huh?”

Ty’s gaze flicked past Sean, then his arm dropped. “Take your goddamn food before we get arrested for corrupting a minor.”

Sean turned to get his food and froze. The girl in the drive-through window was a dead ringer for his littlest sister Naeve’s best friend, but she didn’t seem to recognize him, or the car, so he gave
her his best
I’m-totally-harmless
smile as he reached out the window for the bag of grease and extra-large sugar water, then set the bag on his lap, and put the drink in the holder between him and Ty. “I know why I was there,” he said conversationally. He dug in the bag, then crammed four french fries into his mouth. “Get the LT laid after fifteen months overseas, and in a completely fucked-up, guy bonding way, it was thoughtful. But maybe you should have considered what Lauren meant to you before you did it.”

Hypocrite. Maybe
you
should have thought about how
you’d
feel when Abby moved on before you sent her a terse, near-brutal e-mail.

Ty tipped his head back against the headrest and closed his eyes. “She doesn’t mean anything to me,” he said.

“Bullshit,” Sean said through a mouthful of burger as he turned onto the main drag and headed for No Limits, where they’d left Ty’s truck. “Remember that hot little thing about me watching you fuck her, you watching her go down on me? I was there. Watching. You care about her. It was all over your face, in the way you touched her. And in the end, when she lost all control, she turned to you. Not me.”

“She just knows me better,” Ty said when Sean pulled into the No Limits parking lot. “Emotions have nothing to do with it.”

“You can keep denying it,” Sean said quietly, “but it won’t change reality. That’s the shitty thing about reality. Doesn’t change just because you want it to.”

Ty shot him a final glare, then got out of the Mustang and slammed the door, heading for his truck at the back of the parking lot. Sean stared out his window at the people lined up between the club’s brick facade and the velvet rope keeping them out of the parking lot. Two big bouncers controlled access to No Limits while the presence of two off-duty Galveston cops provided a visible deterrent to fights, drunk driving, and sex in the parking lot.

He recognized one of the cops as Ben, Abby’s hookup, now smiling bright and sharp as he talked to a group of women in short skirts, short shorts, low-cut blouses, painted faces and pouty lips, hair spilling suggestively over shoulders and into cleavage, more female skin than he’d seen in fifteen months. Until tonight. One hot encounter with Ty and Lauren barely made a dent in the longing pent up inside him. No time like the present.

The bar’s back door opened and Abby emerged, a clear plastic bag of trash in each hand. She flipped up the lid on a commercial Dumpster and tossed first one, then the second bag inside. She walked around the side of the Dumpster and went up on tiptoe to slam the lid.

Sean’s heart stopped. When he walked into No Limits just before 2200, he’d looked for Abby, twice, and hadn’t seen her. Her red hair stood out like flame even in the bar’s dim lighting and glowed in the lights on the dance floor. She must have had a late shift tonight.

Trash emptied, she stopped between the Dumpster and the back door, and put one hand on her hip and the other to her forehead. From his position fifty feet away, hidden in his car, he watched her. Exhaustion slumped her shoulders as she shifted her weight from one foot to the other and rubbed her forehead with the back of her hand. Feeling like a voyeur, Sean watched her as his brain turned over what he knew about the home front.

It was easy to compartmentalize life in a war zone. There was the mission, the men, and there was everything else, all lumped into
the home front
. In an era of modern warfare, with Skype and international cell phones, Facebook and Twitter, the home front seeped into the war zone. Marines talked to their wives every day, heard all about the problems at work, the broken furnace, their kids’ difficulties in school. But because the complicated, powerful emotions roiling in his gut whenever he thought about Abby overwhelmed
him, he’d severed his obligation to the home front in four short sentences. He’d done it for his Marines, both to set an example and to ensure that they had his undivided attention when they needed it. Or so he told himself.

But turning his back on the reality of the home front didn’t make it disappear, and based on what he saw in Ben’s parking lot, somehow carefree Abby’s life had become trench warfare right out of World War I. After tonight he had one of two options. He could set out to fuck his way through the available female population of Galveston in an effort to replace Abby in his body and heart, or he could find out what happened and fix his fuck-up before it really was too late.

The hand rubbing Abby’s forehead dropped to her hip. She straightened her spine, squared up her shoulders, and strode back into the bar, and something about her unyielding attitude resonated deep inside him. Whatever was going on, she wasn’t quitting.

Step one, get intelligence. Step two, formulate a plan.
He’d screwed up once. He wouldn’t do it again.

*   *   *

Closing in on midnight on Halloween, Abby stepped up to the
waitress station on the horseshoe-shaped bar projecting from No Limits’s back wall and called out, “Scotch neat, Ketel One and cranberry.”

Linc Sawyer owned the bar and worked as its lead bartender. He’d hear her and have the drinks made in the time it took for her to survey the costumed crowd. No Limits was packed with slutty nurses, slutty vampires, slutty cheerleaders, slutty French maids, slutty fairies, and extra-slutty strippers. The men wore the barest acknowledgments to costumes and took full advantage of the drink specials and amped-up atmosphere.

“Hey,” Lisette said, adjusting her cat ear headband. “We missed you Saturday.”

“I had to take Dad to the after-hours clinic, then get new prescriptions filled,” she said. The gray color hadn’t just been a lack of fresh air. By four in the afternoon his lips were blue-tinged, and she was on the phone to his doctor. She’d bailed on a closing shift on a Saturday night, and her wallet was already screaming about the lost tips. Her dad’s disability payments barely covered the mortgage.

“How’s he doing?” Lisette asked.

“Better, actually. His doctor met us at the clinic,” she said, remembering her profound relief when Dr. Weaver strode through the door, unflappable and analytical in her approach, no-nonsense enough to make her dad pay attention. “She found a better combination of drugs. He’s slept better the last two nights, but he still needs to gain weight and improve his lung capacity.”

“Good,” Lisette said, and loaded up her tray. “Hey, did that hottie from last week find you?”

Hottie from last week. Sean.
“Yes, he found me,” she said, “and what were you thinking, sending him to Ben’s place?”

“He whipped by the door in a muscle car, driving like a bat out of hell,” Lisette said. “He didn’t catch you before you went up?”

Ah yes, the Mustang
, Sean’s one concession to typical male testosterone toys. He liked to drive, and fast, and he was absolutely fanatical about American muscle cars. “No, but he was waiting three hours later when I came down,” she said.

Lisette’s eyebrows shot up. “Oh?”

“Yes. It was bad. Very bad,” she said. The drinks materialized on the bar in front of her. “Thanks, Linc,” she called, more out of good karma and manners than any hope he’d hear her over the bar’s deafening noise level.

“Maybe that’s for the best,” Lisette said.

“Probably,” Abby agreed, not quite sure what she was agreeing to, but No Limits on Halloween wasn’t the place to carry on a meaningful conversation.

She lifted the tray on her flat palm to shoulder height, turned, and found herself face-to-face with Sean. She shrieked and stepped back, bumping into an occupied stool as she did. The abrupt change of direction sent the tray tilting to the right, and the drinks tipped precariously toward a woman waiting at the bar. Deftly Sean reached out and snagged the Scotch and the vodka cranberry just as the tray clattered to the floor.

“Nice reflexes,” Lisette offered with a flirtatious smile, then whisked away into the crowd.

Abby crouched to reclaim the tray, then walloped Sean on the chest with it. “You scared me half to death! That’s the second time in three days!” she hissed, and added a second wallop for good measure. She might as well wallop a two-hundred-year-old oak tree. “What are you
doing here
?”

“Looking for you. Where do these go?” Sean asked without changing expression.

She blinked. She’d fully expected to see him in the bar again; everyone in Galveston knew if you wanted to hook up, No Limits was the place to do it. But she hadn’t expected him to be looking for her. His eyes, visible to her for the first time in over a year, were the same piercing blue but somehow unreadable. The tan lines from the Oakleys stretched across his temples, and crow’s-feet gathered at the corners of his eyes. Even his mouth looked firmer, less inviting even than it had during the encounter in the parking lot.

Something was different. Every nerve in her body quivered, seeking additional input to make sense of the situation, her brain whirling as it tried to take in both his implacable expression and his sudden appearance. A sharp whistle shocked her out of her reverie.

“I’ll do it.” She held out the tray.

“I’ve got them,” he said.

“Drinks have to be delivered on a tray,” Linc called from behind the bar. “House rules. And stop harassing my waitress or there’s a baseball bat back here with your face on it.”

She gave Sean a bright, false smile and held out the tray with a flourish. “Don’t make me lose this job,” she said through her teeth. She’d been a regular here, in another lifetime, and other regulars tipped her well. “I need this job.”

He set the drinks down on the cork-lined tray. She brushed past him, distributed drinks, made change, accepted her tip, and looked around for the next customer.

Sean was right there. “It’s Halloween. Everyone else is in costume. Why aren’t you?”

He asked because when they’d met before his yearlong deployment and three months of training prior, she’d already been thinking about her costume. This year she’d remembered it was Halloween only when she pulled into the parking lot. “I’m an overworked cocktail waitress with sore feet,” she said, flipping him attitude even as she looked him up and down. He wore cargo pants, a loose shirt, and running shoes that looked like they’d seen a few thousand miles. “Who are you supposed to be?”

“A Marine on leave.”

A good choice to get laid. “Unless you want a drink, go away,” she said. “I’m working.”

“I want a Shiner Bock and five minutes of your time.”

“You can have the beer but not the time,” she threw over her shoulder as she edged her way through the packed house, back to the bar.

“When can I get five minutes?”

He was right behind her, clearing a path easily with his broad shoulders. “When I’m not working or in class, which is almost never. My shadow wants a Shiner Bock,” she said to Linc.

“Get Ben or Steve if he’s bothering you,” Linc said. He popped the top off the beer and handed it to her.